I believe most writers have a home. For me, trie writerly life means finding that home. Maybe your home is the sea, maybe your home is your fears, maybe your home is wizardry, and maybe your home is something as seemingly small as a single incident or a single year of your life. Many writers have more than one home. For me, some of my homes as a writer have been my childhood, my family, and the American landscape.

On Finding a Home

This chapter studies the Japanese American internment narratives published in the early twenty-first century as “neo-internment narratives.” I use the hyphenated term “neo-internment” to highlight both the continuity and disjunction of narratives that challenge the historiography of internment while revisiting and reworking the representation of internment in earlier periods. I examine the works of both well-known and new writers’ first internment novels, focusing on Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, Perry Miyake’s 21st Century Manzanar, and Cynthia Kadohata’s Weedflower. The three novels revitalize internment narratives by engaging in the following aspects: (1) the impact of the emergent present, including the post-9/11 situations, on the reconstruction and rethinking of Japanese American internment; (2) the transnational perspective of internment history and interracial relationships; and (3) the postmemory of the generation born after WWII. I probe into the post-9/11 and post-redress internment memories that are reconstructed or invoked by these narratives using a critical lens attentive to the dynamics of memory at the intersection of the past and the present. In doing so, I contend that Otsuka, Miyake, and Kadohata’s neo-internment narratives illuminate cross-racial and intergenerational memories of Japanese American internment, as well as other events of mass racial violence in American history.

Pei-chen Liao

Papers

Neo-Internment Narratives: Post-9/11, Cross-racial, and Intergenerational Memories